SAM's modern art curator has high hopes for his expanded collection

REGINA HACKET, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

By REGINA HACKETT, P-I ART CRITIC

Published 10:00 pm, Wednesday, March 14, 2007

In this panorama photo, Michael Darling, curator of contemporary art in the new Wright Galleries for Modern and Contemporary Art, is shown with, from left: "Black Series: Coulures Noires" by Ghada Amer; "To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain" by Zhang Huan; "Blue and Gold in Short Skirt" by Sue Williams; "Mann und Maus" by Katharina Fritsch; "On the Wall Above" by Sean Landers; "Rorschach" by Andy Warhol; "An Exhibition of Gasoline Powered Engines" by Ed Ruscha; "Stranger in the Village (Excerpt) #7" by Glenn Ligon; "Some/One" by Do-Ho Suh; "Die Welle (Wave)" by Anselm Kiefer and "White Squad II" by Leon Golub. P-I photographer Mike Urban shot seven individual vertical photos of Darling, panning the camera on a tripod each time. Using the Photomerge software included in Photoshop, he stitched the multiple photos into one.
Photo: Mike Urban/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Nearly all curators who sign on at the Seattle Art Museum to head the modern/contemporary art department start with the same hope: They want to change the view local artists have of the museum from haughty to hot.

Michael Darling arrived at SAM last July from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where he was associate curator. He came just in time for a mad scramble to get the Olympic Sculpture Park open, quickly followed by his next mad scramble: the reopening of the museum downtown on May 5 and -6, with contemporary art gaining triple its former space and dominating the opening exhibit of gifts honoring SAM's 75th birthday.

The galleries for which he is responsible are more or less done.

His opening gambit is quality in volume: SAM has greatly expanded its gallery space downtown, a new sculpture park and a commitment to exhibit contemporary Asian art both downtown and at the Seattle Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park.

It also has new acquisitions that will change its place on the world stage.

For the first time, SAM is able to tell the modern to contemporary story plausibly and in depth. Darling has every reason to hope his galleries will debut with a bang and no whimper.

Interactive videos by Jason Puccinelli will enliven Robert Venturi's grand staircase in the original portion of the downtown museum, beside the Chinese tomb statues originally situated in SAM's Volunteer Park front yard.

The staircase is now in the free admission zone, as is Cai Guo-Qiang's "Inopportune," an airborne fleet of seven Ford Tauruses (with an eighth to mark a beginning and a ninth as an end, parked quietly on the ground) shooting out rays of colored light, as if exploding, inside the new museum space on First Avenue.

Aside from the galleries handled by Patricia Junker, American art curator, Darling owns the third floor. For the first time, SAM is able to present the story of modernism from movement to movement, from abstraction to Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism, Pop and Minimalism.

These galleries are his base, a stepping-off point for art of the present day.

"We're playing to our strengths," he said. "We can't do Impressionism, but we can do what came after. I want to immerse visitors in rooms full of like objects that tell a story."

His survey of the current day includes a Gary Hill video, a Do-Ho Suh dress coat made of army dogtags ("Some/One") from 2001, and a Glenn Ligon painting in coal dust and oil stick.

Anselm Kiefer's "Wave" from 1990 is a painting in lead, clothes, steel wire and ash on canvas that takes up an entire wall and resonates with the tragedy of the German history it represents.

Of course, there's Andy Warhol, but there's also contemporary art from China and the badlands of New Mexico, work from London, New York, the West Coast and the Northwest.

There's an excellent examination of the studio glass movement, and there are surprises.

Having the exhibits in place means for the first time he has time to look around. And listen.

"I've heard grumbling (about the museum)," he said. "But I've also heard surprise when I show up to events that I guess people aren't used to seeing (SAM curators attend)."

Married with two young children, the 39-year-old Darling is in the first flush of the rosy assumption that his good will and expertise can win over those who hold the museum at a chilly arm's length.

And yet he is far from the first SAM curator to show up at galleries, lectures, studios, art cooperatives and other museums. He hobnobs and extends himself. So did they. He has vision and authority. Again, ditto.

Because SAM didn't have a contemporary art curator until Charles Cowles (formerly publisher of Artforum magazine and now running a gallery in his name in New York) arrived in the mid-1970s, Darling is only the fifth to hold the job, which makes the influence of those before him easy to consider.

Only Cowles didn't care what local artists thought. He was more like a missionary, bringing New York art to the art-starved. When he looked around, he saw need, not bounty; gaps to be filled instead of riches to be mined.

Before Cowles, in the long reign of SAM founder Richard Fuller, Seattle artists loved the museum. That's because Fuller was fond of them and hostile to the national and international contemporary scene. He favored Asian and Northwest art. After that, he didn't want to know about it.

Painter William Ivey knew Fuller's limitations but loved him for his loyalty. "He was a gent," Ivey liked to say, pointedly contrasting him with those who ran SAM afterward.

Locals felt iced by the Cowles period, and that antipathy continues to color local perceptions.

On a personal level, he's less crusty than Guenther, less witty than Sims, less fatally sensitive than Fairbrother and less forceful than Corrin. Guenther growled at detractors. Sims charmed them. Fairbrother shrank from contact and Corrin embraced it, as long as she was in charge.

In art, each made distinctive and too frequently unappreciated contributions.

Guenther kept a steady stream of solo Northwest artist shows coming, inventing Documents Northwest and giving each person featured a small catalog. In 1986, he organized a Jacob Lawrence exhibit that traveled and re-energized Lawrence's career. Just before Guenther left, he mounted a fierce and exhilarating international painting survey titled "States of War."

Sims organized a small handful of respectable shows, but he was busy building a new collector base and didn't (in comparison with the others) concentrate on what went up on the walls. Without him, however, art in Seattle would be a shadow of itself.

Among the collectors who were inspired by him to become major, community-sustaining collectors are Bill and Ruth True of Western Bridge, and Jon and Mary Shirley, who underwrote and shepherded into being the Olympic Sculpture Park.

Fairbrother is a curator's curator. He's brilliant, and he's open to art that doesn't have a blue-chip track record. How did he decide what he wanted to show? By looking at it. The way he configured his exhibits was also profoundly visual, setting up unexpected conversations between the artwork in a room.

Yet he couldn't hold his own in a crisis. His inability to support Mike Kelly's "Pay for the Pleasure" after a misinformed attack by a right-wing Web site was disheartening.

Corrin brought her fast pulse to the job. No money in the park's budget for art? She raised it, setting a high bar with the purchase of Richard Serra's "Wake."

After Linda Farris announced that she and her group planned to divide the art they had amassed between SAM and the University of Washington's Henry Gallery, Corrin talked them into giving it all to SAM. Not just most of it, all of it. Far more than any curator before her, she encouraged Seattle to think of itself as part of the Vancouver-to-Portland continuum.

In Seattle, she was a cheerleader with a doctorate, her avid enthusiasms and blunt distastes backed by brains, although some felt mugged by her whirlwind.

Nobody's going to feel mugged by Darling, nor are they likely to worry that they have wounded him. He's both thick-skinned and open-minded.

Can he break the anti-SAM habit?

It's possible Darling won't have to. With all the changes in the modern and contemporary displays, ill feeling could fade on its own, no longer being a useful stance.

One more thing: Darling plans to "ramp up" the Betty Bowen Award, an artist's grant associated with the museum for 28 years. From now on, he says, award winners will have small exhibits at the museum, and he's working on increasing the award's value, which is $11,000.

Guenther used to offer Bowen Award winners exhibits, a practice stopped by Sims. But Darling is the first curator to insist on a vote in the committee, run largely by the late Bowen's friends. Darling is not above bringing back a policy instituted by another curator, but he's going to leave his mark on it, on the museum and on the art experiences it offers.